Originally posted February 17, 2015
Berkeley-Just when it seemed the process to fill the vacant executive director position at Pacifica Radio couldn’t get any more troubled, another shoe dropped when board vice-chair Tony Norman, a DC attorney employed by the federal government, inexplicably carbon-copied his ballot indicating his choice for the position to a public Pacifica discussion list-serv with about 100 subscribers.
Pacifica has been trying to fill the position with no success for almost a year, after ousting the last executive director in March of 2014. The current chair of the board, Margy Wilkinson, a retired clerical worker, has been doing the job for most of the year on a part-time basis. She was briefly interrupted by former KPFK manager Bernard Duncan, who submitted a letter of resignation soon after taking the job citing a pre-existing plan to relocate to his native New Zealand. When the board finally selected a new executive director in January of 2015, the candidate, now identified as labor writer Bill Fletcher Jr, declined the position.
Instead of then turning to the second place candidate, who received strong support from many members of the board, the board of directors embarked on a brand new election, apparently unwilling to abide by the results of the first. Norman’s error, as he characterized it five hours later, was attributed to using his smartphone, although ballots were not due until February 18th. It isn’t clear why Norman was handling confidential attached files on a smartphone on a federal holiday days before the deadline.
Norman’s actions appeared to set off some panic at Pacifica’s national office, where there were reports of lawyers being consulted for advice about what to do. One of the recipients of the email, former WBAI GM Chris Albertson, who maintains a WBAI-focused blog website, went ahead and published the names of the candidates in the final pool on his site at WBAI now and then. Pacifica In Exile, also a direct recipient of Norman’s email, will not do so, but is providing the email’s time, date and senders and recipients for verification purposes here. While we are less than comfortable withholding information released into the public domain, any member of the press or Pacifica member with legitimate reasons to want to confirm the full document may make a private request. Pacifica in Exile has no control over the actions of the other 100 recipients of Norman’s email.
What Norman’s ballot reveals is that he, a card-carrying member of the 2014 board majority, supports the candidate who ranked in the runner-up position in the process the board completed a mere 20 days ago. This suggests the latest maneuver of “redoing” the ranking process to avoid offering the job to the second-ranked candidate, may have backfired on the board, by defrauding a candidate with significant support on both sides of the aisle, robbing Pacifica of qualified leadership. and potentally torpedoing the entire hiring process. This opens the question of whether the board of directors as currently constituted is capable of performing the functions of a nonprofit board or if things have deteriorated beyond that point.
Pacifica in Exile readers may write to the board at pnb@pacifica.org. They may want to suggest a year without an executive director is enough and it is time to make a legitimate job offer to a candidate who has now been through three hiring processes between 2013 and 2015 and cease the shenanigans.
In other news, Pacifica’s large pile of documents is due to the Attorney General of California in the correspondence audit launched by the Registry of Charitable Trusts on December 17, 2014. Among those documents will not be the long-delayed audit of the year ended 9-30-2013, which remains undone after 17 months. Auditor Armanino has declined to sign an engagement letter with Pacifica for the next fiscal year, which ended on 9-30-2014.
The board of directors may lose their liability (D&O) insurance on March 10, 2015 after an emergency extension last fall, unless the completed independent audit for the year ending 9-30-2013 is filed with the insurance provider. Under certain circumstances, lack of directors and officers insurance can allow directors to be personally liable for employment and derivative legal actions should Pacifica become insolvent and no longer able to indemnify board members with the nonprofit’s revenues.
Pacifica’s IED Wilkinson and CFO Salvador informed the board of directors that financial pressures on Pacifica’s national office have increased due to the discovery of an unpaid legal bill for $90,000. The bill that was discovered later turned out to be the bill for Pacifica’s defense against former WBAI program director Bernard White’s 2011 lawsuit for racial discrimination after his 2009 termination. White’s lawsuit was summarily dismissed in 2012. The characterization of the bill as “discovered” is odd as Wilkinson received a full legal expenses summary listing all expenses by case and firm and the balances due on them, as a member of the board in December of 2013, which she appears to have failed to review at the time or in the year following. The assertion the bill was “unknown”, which was repeated numerous times, continues the pattern of providing distorted information to members of the board of directors, who in many cases, have not been on the board for very long.
Financial statements, which presumably are being sent to the Attorney General, contain omissions including missing broadcast tower utilities and rents at three out of the five stations, missing major donations, loans unrecorded in the books, and public statements that continue to be demonstrably inaccurate, including the CFO asserting one of Pacifa’s largest vendor contracts ended in September of 2013 instead of September of 2012, 6 months after being provided with the original contract with the 2012 date. This audio clip from a finance committee meeting provides a snapshot in a sustained Q+A between the CFO and committee member Bill Crosier, a PNB member from 2010-2012 who recently volunteered to take over as the local treasurer in Texas.
The tower cost confusion is most acute in the case of NY’s WBAI whose situation vs a vs their 15-year lease at the Empire State Building (till 2020) is affected by negotiations that appear to defer more than $2 million dollars in remaining liability on the lease to unknown dates on uncertain terms. Texas station KPFT continues to have unresolved broadcast issues. KPFT is now in the middle of their sixth stay to operate at half power and unable to have the broadcast license formally renewed until they are able to broadcast at full power. Discussions about what to do have included a suggestion from PNB treasurer Brian Edwards-Tiekert that KPFT take out a mortgage on their building, discussion of a national on-air fundraising effort by all five stations, and suggestions of a possible permanent power downgrade, although that reduces the value of the station license by millions of dollars over a $165,000 equipment replacement need.
Winter fund drives underway or recently completed at all of the stations were disappointing, with KPFT reporting $207,000 on a $280,000 goal and KPFA reporting $542,000 on a $630,000. Partway through their fund drives, the other three stations were reporting 10-30% shortfalls to date. The shortfalls will exacerbate the cash crunch of the past fall when $500,000 in expense reductions were mandated for the network’s two large California stations, KPFK and KPFA, both of which are now fundraising from dawn to dusk for more than 90 days per year or 25% of their total daytime airtime.
Truthout took a look at Pacifica’s situation in this article by Michael Corcoran.
The national board’s February 11th meeting was largely taken up by a ponderous multi-hour process of appointing board members to 2015 officer positions and committees. As usual, the contested positions focus on the board’s finance committee which develops annual budgets for all 7 units of the nonprofit. For the board chairmanship, and the interim executive director position if the board never makes a permanent hire, George Reiter and Margy Wilkinson will once again oppose each other in a repeat of the 2014 tied election Wilkinson she claims she won on the basis of a mismarked ballot that gave her a “fifth place ranking” when there were only two candidates. KPFK listener representative Lydia Brazon and affiliate director Janis Lane-Ewart are candidates for the vice-chair position. Lane-Ewart was executive director at the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) in 2013.
In other business, the 2015 board finally passed the DC station budget the 2014 board neglected, leaving the budgetary process for the year that began 10-1-2014 finally completed 131 days into the new fiscal year. The board also approved a casual extension of the $156,000 loan to NY station WBAI (indemnified by the 501c3 Pacifica Foundation) from board member Lydia Brazon’s employer after Pacifica defaulted on the first installment payment due in October of 2014. The new agreement, which also contains no terms for late or missed payments from Pacifica nor an arbitration clause, pushes the payments into six installments rather than five and slates them to now start in September of 2015.
KPFA’s local advisory board is holding an open meeting at Berkeley’s Public Library at 2090 Kittredge Street on February 22, from 1:30 to 3:30pm, to discuss strengthening community ties with the Berkeley radio station. The event is open to all and the CAB describes it as: “This event, sponsored by the KPFA Community Advisory Board is open to the public and is especially for individuals, community groups and social justice activists who want to be involved with KPFA’s free speech radio-media network. We want to explore new possibilities for KPFA live streaming, outreach interviews, Twitter, and other radio-media resources. We want to support the dissemination of people’s stories, perspectives, and thinking to foster effective coverage about local events as well as our responses to national and global actions such as those we witness in Ferguson, New York and Cleveland.Join us in building a KPFA Community and Staff Network, addressing issues of democratization and justice in our lives, in our communities and for the planet”.
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Started in 1946 by conscientious objector Lew Hill, Pacifica’s storied history includes impounded program tapes for a 1954 on-air discussion of marijuana, broadcasting the Seymour Hersh revelations of the My Lai massacre, bombings by the Ku Klux Klan, going to jail rather than turning over the Patty Hearst tapes to the FBI, and Supreme Court cases including the 1984 decision that noncommercial broadcasters have the constitutional right to editorialize, and the Seven Dirty Words ruling following George Carlin’s incendiary performances on WBAI. Pacifica Foundation Radio operates noncommercial radio stations in New York, Washington, Houston, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and syndicates content to over 180 affiliates. It invented listener-supported radio.